What Is Laughing Squid?

photo of the Doggie Diner Dog Heads by Scott Beale

Here’s a bit more on what Laughing Squid is all about, beyond what is in our FAQ, on Wikipedia and what has been written about us. People often mention that they’ve heard of Laughing Squid, but don’t really know what it is that we actually do, so hopefully this will give a better idea. Here’s our short description:

Laughing Squid is a blog featuring interesting art, culture & technology as well as a cloud-based web hosting company.

Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ’96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List and for a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998. In 2000 John Law joined as a partner in Laughing Squid as head of “special projects”, followed by David Klass, joining as evangelist-at-large.

Here a few things that Laughing Squid currently does and has done in the past:

BLOG – We’ve been running a blog since 2003, which we relaunched on WordPress in 2005. There we post about a variety of things mostly relating to art, culture and technology. We also run a link blog on Tumblr where we cross-post things from the main Laughing Squid blog, plus other interesting things we find around the web.

The Laughing Squid blog is run by founder and primary tentacle Scott Beale, who acts as Editor-In-Chief. He is joined by Managing Editor Rusty Blazenhoff, Senior Contributing Writer EDW Lynch and Contributing Writer Justin Page, Contributing Writer Kimber Streams and Contributing Editor-at-Large mikl-em.
WEB HOSTING – Since 1998 we have been providing dependable web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. This is our primary source of revenue, aka “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from our web hosting operations helps fund Laughing Squid blog. Our web hosting operations are located over at laughingsquid.us.
PROPAGANDA – Our infamous logo, created by the super talented Matt Dong, has been making the rounds since around 2000 and shows up on our t-shirts, stickers, mugs and buttons. We also commissioned a series of 10 post cards from some of our favorite artists. Here’s more on The History of the Laughing Squid Logo.
COMMUNITY – When Laughing Squid started out in San Francisco in 1995, it became part of a vibrant community. A few of the events and organizations we have been involved with over the years include Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine.
THE SQUID LIST – Since 1996 we have been running The Squid List, a curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both an online calendar, as well as an email list.